Truc

There's nothing like a cassoulet in winter. Or rillettes. And check out that little pickle fork.

Dining Out by Stephen Heuser

560 Tremont Street (South End), Boston
(617) 338-8070
Open Tues - Thurs, 6 to 10 p.m.;
Fri and Sat, 6 - 10:30 p.m.; and Sun 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. (brunch)
and 6 to 9 p.m. (dinner)
MC, Visa
Beer and wine
Handicapped Access down four steps from street level

By now it's old news that a French revival is under way among Boston restaurants. The classically rich tastes of reduction sauces and preserved meats have burst, as though new, into a city overrun with the lean, acidic flavors of Mediterranean cooking. The latest entry in this revival is a very adept bistro called Truc, which opened last fall on Tremont Street, in the South End.

Truc is the baby of chef-owner Corinna Mozo. Her last gig was as chef at Chez Henri, which sounds very French but whose gimmick is French-Cuban cooking. Mozo, herself both French and Cuban, has shed her Cuban influences for now (Chez Henri marches on in the same idiom without her) to create a menu at Truc that puts a hip, smiley face on Gallic tradition.

Truc is a French word that means, colloquially, "thingy," and although there are lots of thingies on any given plate, the menu is not quite as arbitrary as that might sound. It is, however, ingredient-intensive in the way that Boston bistro menus tend to be. The plainest salad here sounds straightforward at first -- frisée and endive ($8) -- but turns out to be almost an appetizer sampler in itself, a virtual hedge of curly frisée tossed in a subtle, unassuming vinaigrette and accented with matchstick-sliced endive hearts. But wait, there's more: cold asparagus spears, crisply undercooked; a poached egg, still soft inside and with a delicate taste of vinegar; and a generous slice of smoked salmon, which is a surprising thingy to put on a salad plate, but which was delicious -- very smoky and flavorsome, with a silky-buttery texture.

A plate of sweetbreads ($10) was Truc's most artful moment. Half a calf's brain, not in itself the most appetizing-looking object, was presented as sculpture on a broad white plate -- wrapped in a thick slice of bacon, surrounded by a lucent auburn-colored sauce, and topped with a spray of frisée. The meat was tender and rich, the sauce almost fruity.

In terms of audience participation, though, another appetizer, rillettes de maison ($8), put the rest to shame. "Rillettes" is a singular thingy, not a plural one; it's a little terrine of long-cooked pork that has been pounded in its own fat. The result has a texture somewhere between pâté and shredded meat. It has a wonderful, hearty taste; you spread it on grilled bread (provided) and top it with some of the sweet-tart quince compote that is served alongside. And again, there's more: our waiter delivered, on the side, an open pot of Pommard mustard (piquant, seedy) and a glass jar of cornichons, the zippy little pickles used by the French and the Swiss as accompaniment to cured meats. You spoon out the mustard with the little spoon provided; you spear the cornichons with a special little fork. It's a traditionalist's playground.

The menu at Truc is short -- five entrées, five appetizers, no specials -- but hardly lacking in variety, as long as you like meat. The rabbit ($21), for instance, was exquisite: a leg braised to the consistency of very tender chicken. The real treat on the plate, though, was the rabbit loin: tender coins of saddle meat coated in herbs, wrapped in thick slices of bacon, and laid in a row along the plate's edge in a deep-brown, salty reduction sauce.

Cassoulet, a piping-hot stew from the Languedoc made of white flageolet beans and a variety of meats, may be the best-designed winter dish in any cuisine. Here the beans are profuse, and the meat is chunks of lamb, bacon, duck confit, and one fat garlic sausage. The Truc cassoulet is so hot and so long-cooked that the garlic cloves in it -- though still intact -- have reached the consistency of softened butter. There was even a duck leg in the stew, although duck meat does seem to dry out a lot in the cooking.

Lighter going was the trout meunière ($21), a dish whose spare, lemony taste didn't overwhelm the trout's delicate flesh. The fish was served as a fillet, belly-up, alongside a cute (no other word for it) miniature iron skillet of parsleyed roast potatoes. Over the trout was a fan of crisp haricots verts; next to it, a row of roast miniature tomatoes, tart and sweet and delicious.

The one dish I'd have trouble recommending, if only on grounds of value-consciousness, is the steak frites ($21). The plate was mostly fries (twice fried, crisp and oily, in the French style), and the sweet-basted hanger steak was awfully small. I like the hanger, an obscure and flavorful cut of meat, but this was not the best example.

For dessert (all $6.50) we had a pear tart -- cubes of pear in round pastry crimped around the outside -- served with a lovely honey-thyme ice cream, with just the lightest taste of honey and a faint and complementary aroma of thyme. Another dessert was a four-layer lemon cake ("quatre quarts au citron," according to the menu) that was beautifully presented -- a yellow cylinder amid a sea of bright-crimson raspberry sauce -- but a bit on the stiff side in texture. A cheese plate ($8) brought three very small wedges of French cheese: an aged blue, a pungent stinky cheese, and a salty, aggressive sheep's-milk, served with bread and slices of Anjou pear and green apple.

Service at Truc, after an initial pileup at the door, was exemplary one night and perfectly adequate another; both nights, our water was refilled by a specialist, with near-religious attention. Truc's wine list, though we didn't get too far into it, is almost entirely French; for $6 we had a glass of Trimbach pinot blanc that went astoundingly well with the rillettes, and for $19 we split a half-bottle (I love the half-bottle) of a Gigondas that was perfectly pleasant and balanced, if not quite as full-flavored as we expected.

One final thing about Truc: after a year and a half in which every new bistro in the city has opened with mustard-colored walls, this newcomer has painted its long, narrow South End space a vivid green. The effect is refreshingly stylish, heightened by a pair of stark black-and-white prints on the wall and a single long, chocolate-colored banquette. A little restraint goes a long way.

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This might be an occupational disqualifier, but I don't really like much food writing. Usually it's pretentious, or boorish, or snobby, or dull. None of these things, however, applies to the writing of Jeffrey Steingarten, whose book The Man Who Ate Everything (Knopf) appeared on my desk a month or two ago with one of those precious modern covers: surfaced like bread, with a bite taken out of the spine. And quite a hefty spine it is, too: Steingarten is the food critic for Vogue, and he has collected 494 pages' worth of very lucid writing about everything from "true choucroute" to how to feed two adults for less than $5 a day. If that range makes him sound like a latter-day M.F.K. Fisher, it should; Steingarten's unaffected, surehanded prose and his catholic tastes owe a lot to the greatest American food writer of them all. The book costs $27.50, about the price of a restaurant steak and a glass of wine. It might not taste as good, but it will stay with you a lot longer.

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